Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Director ~ George Miller

Writers ~ George Miller, Nick Lathouris

2024, Australia-US

Stars ~ Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke

 

Firstly, the pace is different. Where ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ was all revving up and then full speed ahead, Furiosa’s tale is a bildungsroman and makes many drive-bys and pitstops over time to chronicle her stolen childhood. Her nemesis Dr. Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) is coded as still hanging onto his own lost childhood by the stuffed bear he carries, the one that he tries to pass onto her but young Furiosa (Alyla Brown) rejects. Keep note of that.

It's pretty with its wastelands, takes time with its tale rather than stunts, although when the stunts come there is no disappointment. There are lots of expendable War Boys and gang punks, noise that hardly abates, a bad guy full of bluster in Dementus (Chris Helmsworth) but who’s not particularly good at the politics once he’s won a kingdom. He’s no Immortan Joe (Lachy Hume). The facing-off between the bad guys is a high point.  Hemsworth is having a grand old time, riding his bike chariot and putting in a prime performance. The segue from young to adult Furiosa, from Alyla Browne to Anya Taylor-Joy is effortless, and the latter puts in a striking wordless performance; those eyes do a lot of work. The only male saviour gesture here for Furiosa is by Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke – gruff and secretly humane in the manner of Max), and he’s just getting by too, but otherwise she is out there making her own code of morals and survival.

Which means that ‘Furiosa’ is even more interested in the characters behind the whacky names than previously. Or rather, never has Miller been quite so confident at giving the bizarre their trauma and credence. It’s always been there, but with ‘Fury Road’s Nux he hit a rich stream that he continues to mine here. Where the original film promised much that the sequel delivered on, with ‘Fury Road’ Miller got right the incisive study of a post-apocalyptic crazy culture study that he didn’t quite manage with ‘Beyond Thunderdome’. As Tatsam Mukherjee writes, George Miller “gives us another film filled to the brim with his fears and doubts about the world, and shrouds it in a blockbuster.”

Where there’s a typical given shallowness to the genre, rarely does an action flick possess such genuine despair and outrage and thrill at the same time. There seems to be some kickback because it did not profit as well on its opening weekend as ‘Fury Road’, or because Ana Taylor-Joy is the lead, or because it’s not as good as ‘Fury Road’ or something. As if something of this calibre comes along all the time. As if we regularly get a moment like the War Rig (and he’s directed three of these!). If it is lesser than ‘Fury Road’, it is surely a little due to familiarity and to heightened expectation. In fact, ‘Furiosa’ is commendably different in tone, being a fully-fledged coming-of-age-in-a-post-apocalypse story, although the difference is a disappointment to some.

Dementus and Furiosa spell out the themes quite clearly in their final face-off, as if the whole franchise is stopping to examine the consequences of its multiple pile ups. Like ‘Fury Road’s tirade against tyrants and patriarchy, there is more to ‘Furiosa’ under the hood. Any film that features, let alone begins with a female taking fruit from a tree is going to make me sigh, but by the ending the symbolism achieves layers that carries on the anti-patriarchal line of ‘Fury Road’, allowing for a non-subtle but nevertheless subversive underlay. - Are you sure that we were the sinners? Let me relocate the tree and the blame in its rightful place; and don’t forget that this hellhole is a bunch of male-dominated petrolheads brmming around being degenerate and stealing childhoods. - The symbolism may be broad, but it accumulates to a sophistication; this is more than just sound and fury. 

It’s a slab of definitive action cinema, but in saving all its eloquence and reflection for its showdown – indeed, the most articulate and self-reflective of the whole series, and one that must have been the big enticement for Helmsworth – ‘Furiosa’ ends with a little commentary on the whole bombast, reminding us that the whole thing started with the agonising madness of grief and loss.

And of course the stunts are jaw-dropping.